I’m not set up for capturing a live stream. Is anyone capturing this?
EDIT: I’m now running gtk-recordmydesktop. We’ll see if it works. Fortunately, they’re presenting sequentially and ioptio is later on the schedule.
EDIT1: Seems they’re only streaming the lightning talks. No sign of the workshops.
Why? Have Google or FB purchased the Internet?
In a way, yes.
They charge you for access to their services (via your personal information) and control what you see.
That is pretty much ownership in my book.
And yes, you can choose not to use their services, but you would lose access to a gigantic percentage of the web.
That’s just not true. And even if it were, you’d still be incorrect. People who use bitcoin don’t care about being in a ‘bitcoin cult’ over ‘progress in science’. They use bitcoin because it solves their problem somehow. People who don’t use Dash don’t use it because ‘they care about a bitcoin cult’, they do so because more people use Bitcoin than Dash. 1 counter example is enough to disprove a premise such as: [quote=“luckybit, post:60, topic:9733”]
First mover advantage is only real if people care more about being in a cult than about progress in science.
[/quote]
Its interesting that you mention Myspace, because its still around. Unix is still around and Unix/Linux is more widely used in some niches. In fact, a Linux derivative is still the most popular OS in use (Android). Linux is more widely used in the supercomputer arena. Apple’s doesn’t really have a first mover advantage because they weren’t the first in the smartphone sphere (blackberry was). First mover advantage isn’t the ONLY thing, but it is a very significant thing and to dismiss it as irrational cult-like behavior is again, naive. At the least, what we can say is that first-mover advantage grants significant power to determine markets and how they operate (as blackberry did in its hey-day). In fact, blackberry is still the standard in smartphone security, right or wrong which proves the first-mover effect. The only thing that can supplant first-mover advantage is a DRASTIC improvement in utility.
I see this fallacy a lot, people arguing about ‘free markets’ and ‘science’ as if these things are immutable laws of physics or something. It is really a sycophantic obsession with something, anything, that gives the perception that it doesn’t change. Science is ‘progress’ because its supposedly unbiased. The ‘free market’ will save us because, reasons. The problem is we don’t exist in a free market (and never can) and science is not inherently unbiased because these are merely abstractions. Abstractions that, by definition, abstract away the forces that make them biased and not ‘free’. This fallacious logic causes people to make the error you’re now making.
Going back to utility, Bitcoin is LIGHTYEARS ahead of banking. And Dash is about 2-3x more useful than bitcoin (quick, decentralized, incentivized governance and development are HUGE advantages). And yet, banks have many orders of magnitude more users and funds available than either. Bitcoin has 2 orders of magnitude more market cap than Dash. So its clear that you are incorrect that first mover advantage is merely ‘cult thinking’ over ‘progress’ because these services that are still in use despite their lower utility are in use because of their current usefulness. Banks are slow but they solve the problem for a lot of people. Even if you told everyone tomorrow about Bitcoin’s greater utility, lower fees and all around freedom from centralized control, the usage rates would remain the same. Why? Not because of ‘cult-like’ thinking, again a naive explanation that doesn’t explain anything, but because of ‘momentum’. Momentum is the same in abstract as it is in physical life, where its given by the formula p = mv. The more MASSIVE you are and the FASTER you’re going, the more momentum you have.
So, even if you have something like bitcoin which can accelerate much faster than banks can, and Dash which can do so faster than both, it is only when the product of the mass and velocity exceeds that of the target that the item in question can overtake it. In other words, you have to plot the decrease in momentum of banks vs the increase in momentum of Bitcoin (or anything) in order to determine when one will have greater reach than the other. The first mover advantage imparts considerable momentum to whomever arrives first. And because there are only a finite number of people, your only two options are to steal momentum from the banks (via taking their customers e.g. through excessively greater utility) or to increase your momentum through those who they do not service ( ala the Iphone taking the market that blackberrry hasn’t reached yet). Either way, the first mover advantage cannot be overtaken until you have enough mass and velocity. Which explains any case where a first-mover is not being overtaken by a newcomer.
So utility is actually not what matters at all. Utility only matters insofar as it can impart momentum. Bitcoin’s utility is much, much greater than banks, but because bitcoin has limited reach (mass here), it has limited growth (velocity) and thus smaller momentum. If Banks were smaller or didn’t arrive first, they would have less momentum, less power and would be more easily overtaken by bitcoin and other alternatives.
The same applies generally. If someone beats Maidsafe to the punch, they will gain significant momentum especially since the number of people interested in decentralization has grown. Maidsafe would have to REMOVE THAT MOMENTUM in order to become the solution we all know it should be. The number of people interested in this sphere is growing but it is still a small fraction of the population. Anyone who moves first will get a significant slice of that pie and have the power to shut out newcomers whose utility doesn’t impart to them significantly more user adoption rates.
Brand loyalty is cult loyalty. Bitcoin has no first mover advantage. Probably less than 10 million people in the whole world care about Bitcoin.
Utility depends on context. Banks hold and process M1, and cash (i.e., fiat currency notes) in particular. I don’t need a computer or the Internet to use cash and I can perform each transaction instantly. I can use a bank to deposit it so I’m not carrying around a dangerous amount. Bitcoin is less efficient in these contexts, and that is at least part of the reason banks have not been displaced by Bitcoin. It is not all momentum.
I can see how momentum is 100% the explanation for dominance in some cases: Consider Microsoft Windows. The graphical user interface (GUI) was invented by Xerox but they didn’t do much with it. Apple made it the user interface of the Macintosh computer which effectively had first-mover advantage (for the GUI) and was arguably, technically superior to Microsoft Windows on an PC. But Microsoft had enormous momentum gained from its contract with IBM to supply the DOS operating system for the PC, and Windows was an overlay of DOS so it preserved that momentum.
Just tweet him and TBL. Thats what I did.
Well, arguing whether or not Bitcoin actually has a first-mover advantage is one thing, arguing that it doesn’t exist is completely another. By saying that its not well known you’re implying it hasn’t really moved. That’s a plausible argument, but it still has more momentum than any other contender, so overtaking it would take either a change in current trends or a massive collapse in Bitcoin. Something like what maid could be poised to do.
I watched some of the lightning talks, and I find it very encouraging that so many smart people, such as the creator of IPFS, Juan Benet, are still stuck on blockchains in their thinking. He mentioned that they are working on a coin to incentivize their storage (I wonder where he got that idea from?) but it is blockchain-based.
It is actually good that the consensus mechanism of SAFE is hard to understand in detail. I’m still getting there. Instead, most non-SAFE developers seem to think that since blockchains are a proven technology and relatively simple in concept then that’s where they should direct their attention. Only after SAFEnet is running will the penny (of clue) drop for most of them.
There were no workshops on the stream, but Ioptio was the facilitator (umpire?) for the afternoon’s lightning talks, from the 4:47 point in the recording.
So how did the workshop go? There’s no recording anywhere, that I can find; I even contacted the video crew, and received no answer.